Monthly Archives: July 2014

Texas EquuSearch, a Houston-based group involved in searches for missing persons around the nation, said it will resume using drones in its work after a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a warning the group received to stop using them didn’t have any legal consequences.

Texas EquuSearch had sued the Federal Aviation Administration, seeking to overturn what the group described as an order it had been sent in February by email prohibiting the nonprofit organization from using drones.

While a three-judge panel for a federal appeals court Washington, D.C., dismissed the lawsuit, Brendan Schulman, an attorney for Texas EquuSearch, said that was good for the group.

In its ruling, the appeals court said it can’t review the case because the email Texas EquuSearch had received didn’t represent the FAA’s final conclusion on the use of drones. Final rules on drone use are expected next year.

In the fall of 1987, a high school senior named Todd Matthews became obsessed with his first mystery corpse. The dead woman had been found in 1968, in Georgetown, Kentucky, wrapped in a tarp. People called her Tent Girl. Matthews felt a force urging him to piece together Tent Girl’s identity, and for years he scrutinized every detail the police and journalists might have missed. He dreamed about Tent Girl appearing in his living room. He consulted a psychic. He spent so much time and money looking for Tent Girl that his wife threatened to leave him. Then, one night in 1998, up past midnight on his Compaq Presario, he found a matching missing-persons report. When a DNA test identified Tent Girl as Barbara Taylor, Matthews was in the courthouse conference room. “It was such an emotional moment for us

BLACK RIVER FALLS, Wis. (WEAU) — Two cold cases in Jackson County are back in the forefront and now the sheriff’s department is hoping a university in Texas and a national database will bring closure and justice.

In a press conference Monday Jackson County Sheriff Duane Waldera announced a renewed effort by detectives to solve two of the county’s oldest cold cases.

Sheriff Waldera says in both cases the victims were dismembered and their remains were never identified.

“They discovered a plastic garbage bag with the remains of a human head,” Waldera explained.

The first case is from August 1978 where a human skull from a man was found by a logging crew in the township of Knapp in Jackson County.

The second is a case from October 1990, where the dismembered body of a 24-year old woman was found in two shallow graves in Brockway Township.

Do-it-yourself detectives. A new army of freelance amateurs is using the Internet to solve cold cases–long-unsolved homicides—across the country.

On TV, cold cases get solved with a magical high tech ease. Here’s the body. Here are the teeth. Here’s the DNA swab. Done. In real life, lots and lots of deaths, murders, bodies just remain mysterious. Unidentified. Unsolved. Frozen. Buried. Forgotten. Police and detectives eventually have other things to do. But some people don’t. They’re obsessed. They’re online. And they’re endlessly playing with the puzzle pieces. Sleuthing after hours. Connecting the dots of unsolved deaths and crimes. This hour On Point: Cold cases, crowd-sourced and cracked, by freelancers online. — Tom Ashbrook